Washington Week

Appearing on PBS reporter roundtable on Washington Week Friday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell complained that Republicans have “controlled the narrative” when it comes to the Mueller report. She also acted like she was a Democratic strategist for a second by urging the Democrats to focus on health care instead of obsessing about Mueller and Russia.

Some liberal journalists just can't get the notion out of their minds that George Wallace was a Republican, even though the former segregationist governor of Alabama was a lifelong Democrat. On Friday's Washington Week on PBS, host Robert Costa -- also a Washington Post reporter -- suggested that Wallace was a part of the Republican party's "past" as he recalled that some black voters in Alabama are worried about the direction the GOP is taking.

On Wednesday, Columbia University’s Journalism School announced that liberal PBS NewsHour anchor Gwen Ifill would be the recipient of the graduate program’s 2016 John Chancellor Award. The school’s dean, Steve Coll, laughably justified honoring Ifill for “her unflinching pursuit of the truth, healthy skepticism of those in power and her commitment to fairness.”

Appearing as a panel member on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, PBS host Gwen Ifill made a negative characterization of GOP presidential candidates' reactions to recent terrorist attacks as she declared that, "For Republicans, it's going to be a variation of what we've seen so far, which is, 'How can we be more alarmist than the last guy?'"

She then moved to take jabs at GOPers Chris Christie and Donald Trump as she suggested that the discussion was moving away from, "What can you really do about it?"

National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service have attempted on Fridays to run a “Week in Politics” segment and PBS even has a long-standing show called Washington Week. But on Friday, all these programs discussed a “week” utterly without any analysis of the 2015 elections.

Try to imagine how the media would have covered it if the transgender “equal rights” initiative won in Houston, pot was legalized in Ohio, Kentucky elected another Democrat governor, and the state senate went Democrat in Virginia. Wouldn’t that be brought to bear on how it might affect the presidential race in 2016 and the march of liberal inevitability? But conservatives won, so who has any time on a taxpayer-funded outlet?

On Friday’s Washington Week, PBS’s Gwen Ifill and her two panelists, Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty and CNBC’s John Harwood, did their best in trying to defend Hillary Clinton from the ongoing controversy surrounding her use of a private e-mail server while Secretary of State.

Discussing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s surprising primary loss, on Friday’s Washington Week on PBS, John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, a regular on NBC and MSNBC, and a political writer for the New York Times, blamed hostility to Jews in Cantor’s “very rural conservative southern district.”

“Eric Cantor is a Jewish Republican. This is a very rural conservative southern district where that is not a -- you don’t have a lot of Jewish members of Congress from the South.”

We’re halfway through 2013, and PBS’s Washington Week used last Friday’s episode to reflect on the past six months of D.C. politics. During the course of the reflections, moderator Gwen Ifill trotted out the oft-uttered liberal complaint about “distractions” that have impeded President Obama’s second-term agenda so far.

She lamented, “You know, the one thing that's been a common theme throughout this first six months has been distractions. The ways in which pure politics has driven what ends up happening.”

On last Friday’s Washington Week, PBS moderator Gwen Ifill brought in a panel of four liberal journalists to dissect the three scandals that have plagued the Obama administration the past couple of weeks. Predictably, most of the panelists attempted to downplay the seriousness of the Benghazi fiasco.

Midway through the Benghazi discussion, Ifill turned to The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe and posed the question that has surely been on every left-wing reporter’s mind for months: “But Ed, why is this -- why is this stuck? Why is this a story that never went away?”

My Wednesday blog on PBS anchor Gwen Ifill emceeing a gay group's fundraiser that honored HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for implementing ObamaCare drew some attention across the web, including The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. WashPost media blogger Erik Wemple looked askance at the PBS star's appearance of a conflict of interest. But the strongest response came from PBS ombudsman Michael Getler: he declared Ifill should have skipped the event.

Ifill responded to Wemple's questions by claiming she isn't being paid, she wasn't going to honor Sebelius, and she accepted without knowing of the honor. She was just going to say "welcome," announce some anodyne agenda items, and "announce dessert." The Whitman-Walker Clinic is "just using me as a draw." That's still using her name (and PBS cachet) to raise money for gay-left lobbying, legal services, and health services. Wemple wrote:

In 2008, it was questionable that PBS NewsHour and Washington Week anchor Gwen Ifill could moderate the vice-presidential debate as she was writing a book called “The Breakthrough” about the rise of Barack Obama and other black liberal politicians. On Thursday night, Ifill will cross another Obama line by acting as emcee for a fundraiser for the LGBT health and advocacy group the Whitman-Walker Clinic that will honor Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services for her work in implementing ObamaCare.

The invitation says “Please join Gwen Ifill, managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for the PBS News Hour, and the Whitman-Walker family as we honor United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius for advancements in health care.” To be an "event host" and be listed on the program requires a $1,000 donation. Individual tickets are $150.

After Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's win in Saturday's Iowa Straw Poll, the Obama-loving media have been working overtime to make darned certain the public doesn't think this has any significance.

Doing her part was PBS's Gwen Ifill who said on Sunday's "Face the Nation," "The last person to actually get elected president to win a Straw Poll was George W. Bush" - as if that was soooo long ago (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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